Building a better world for all children: toolkit for social inclusion of migrant or refugee students in schools - output of the international project "Lend a Hand"

At the scope of the Erasmus+ Project Lend a Hand - Social Inclusion Programming for Migrant and Refugee Children at Primary Schools, a toolkit was built representing suggested measures to promote inclusion of migrant children / youth in school. The toolkit development was supported by curricula specially conceived for the learning of the language of the host country and for counselling, based on the needs analysis made within the three partner countries: Turkey, Italy and Portugal. Based on the needs identified by stakeholders (educators, teachers, education and social support technicians, school mediators, refugee emergency and reception specialists and migration support associates) a strategic action plan was produced aimed at policy makers, with repercussions in the legal framework, school management and at the classroom level. It is intended a resource set, useful and sustainable for social inclusion. The tool kit was conceived under the principle of supporting learning complementing available tools, many of them available at the European Commission's website (www.coe.int). However, in addition the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, 2001) and other documents developed by the Council of Europe of particular significance to this purpose, along with the Guide for the Development of Language Education Policies in Europe (Beacco & Byram, 2003) and the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters that made helpful the set of instruments to enabling communication, besides directives of National General Directorates of Education (in the case of Portugal http://www.dge.mec.pt) facilitating access to relevant documents: Guides for Educators and Teachers, pedagogical-didactic guidelines for an inclusive, sustainable and intelligent education, the merit of this toolkit is reconciling language learning with personal and social training, and articulating work in the classroom with continuing education beyond school, involving the civil community, beyond teachers, school professionals, families, also municipalities and local community in partnership for co-building new intercultural opportunities for everybody. It means, a school that promotes full inclusion is grounded upon intercultural attitudes, practices and competences, is reflexive about the diversity of the educational community taking it as a learning resource and develops cooperation; all children and the entire community must be active participating, all committed to all, assuming education as a long-life learning process or a citizenship issue on the mainstream of human rights. The empowerment of schools through a curriculum of inclusion only can be a reality if the diversity is made respectful and valuable inspiring transformative educational practices. To reach such a goal it is necessary to support children and their families as well as professionals at social equipment’s, educational, legal, health, commercial and convenience services providing information and narrowing relationships to make cohesion happen. And that is already a reality in some schools the Lend a Hand project encourages networking.